Chapter Text
xxx
She comes to him in the thick of winter.
If one could call it that.
Here in the Stormlands, winter is not the same as in the North. Here, winter doesn’t blanket all the eye can see in snow. It doesn’t choke you with needles in every breath you take.
It doesn’t leave you cold to your very bones.
No, here in the Stormlands, winter is transient. It passes some days but not others, barely touching the ground. As if it knows it’s not welcome.
The day Arya Stark rides into the castle is the coldest they have in several weeks.
The new Lord of Storm’s End doesn’t believe in coincidences.
xxx
“You have a visitor.”
Ser Davos greets him in his solar, Gendry’s first stop after returning from a long tour of nearby villages.
He is exhausted but not in an unpleasant way. His favorite part of lordship duties is being out there in the more remote lands, getting to know the people who have made their homes there, who work with their hands to provide for their families.
Those people are more familiar to him than any of the highborn families that have come calling on him since he inherited his father’s legacy.
Gendry feels at ease out there, on horseback, hammer strapped to his back, riding from village to village. It gives him a sense of peace, knowing that if all this good fortune goes to shit, he can still find happiness out there somewhere, amongst the common folk.
Amongst people like him.
It’s perhaps this false sense of security that leaves him unprepared for when Ser Davos looks at him somewhat pointedly and says, “the visitor is Arya Stark and she’s in your chambers.”
Gendry nearly drops the cup of wine he’s poured himself, and the older man’s expression softens, almost as if in pity.
“She wouldn’t let the servants make up a bed for her.”
The revelation puts him at ease. It’s as if she were some apparition before, just a name on Davos’ lips, but with this statement, Arya has become very real.
“Of course, she didn’t.”
Then he drains the entire cup and goes to find her.
xxx
Gendry isn’t sure what he is expecting but this isn’t it.
Arya is lying fully clothed on his bed, and even though she’s faced away from him, it’s clear that she is asleep.
He doesn’t mean to do it, but his feet carry him to the bed and he lies down beside her, leaving plenty of space between them.
He has not seen her since Winterfell, since she rejected his proposal and rode out to presumably King’s Landing without telling a soul. He’d searched for her in the days before and after the council meeting, but he hadn’t found her. He knows that she couldn’t have gone far, not while her broth – cousin’s – fate hung in the balance.
He has no real proof that she was there during the siege either but he knows it in his bones that she was, and it makes it all the more incredible that she is here, alive, and in his bed.
He yearns so much to touch her, to confirm her presence once and for all, but he doesn’t want to wake her. He settles for watching her breathe, tracking the rise and fall of her shoulders until sleep claims him as well.
Gendry wakes some hours later to a pair of tumultuous and oddly alert gray eyes.
His fingers twitch to reach out and pull the errant strands of hair from her face, but he doesn’t dare move, doesn’t say a word, terrified that he’ll scare her off.
“I didn’t mean to,” Arya gestures to the space between them, “but I had been riding for so long and you took forever to come back.”
Gendry exhales the bit of tension he was holding, that delicate knife’s edge that she’s always held him on – not knowing which Arya he was going to get.
The one who vowed to kill all the people who had ever threatened or harmed him or the one who had splintered the ice king into a million pieces and acted like it was nothing.
It appears that this Arya is somewhere in between and he can work with that.
“Some bad weather kept us delayed. It seems winter has paid us a visit today.”
Arya gets at his meaning immediately and Gendry swears he sees a faint blush on her cheeks as she turns on her back and snorts in a very unladylike way.
They don’t say anything but it feels almost like it used to and he cannot help but smile.
“Do you need to rise? Tend to your lordship duties?”
Gendry cranes his neck past her, catalogues the thin line of light emerging from beyond the water.
Gods, it’s really beautiful here. He looks back down at Arya and doesn’t even think about it.
“They can make do without me for a little while longer.”
“Good.”
Her eyes flicker to his for just a moment. Then, she turns over and falls back asleep.
xxx
She does that a lot in the first days of her visit, barely leaving his chambers and going unseen by most of the castle.
When Gendry asks her about it, she just shrugs and says, “I’m tired.”
But he isn’t that stupid.
He sees the haunted look in her eye, knows she’s not telling him everything. Hells, she’s not telling him anything at all, but he knows not to push.
He lets her be, ensuring that the staff brings food and hot water to his chambers for her when she needs it.
He spends his days as he did before – overseeing the grounds, taking his reading and writing lessons, and holding court for visiting Lords and Ladies.
It’s the last part that he dreads the most, not always certain in what he has to say, but knowing enough of the highborn to be suspicious of their requests.
He’s glad to have Davos by his side, a man who has inadvertently advised more leaders than any other person still living, but there is a part of Gendry that yearns for the counsel of another.
And that desire only grows with every passing evening that he finds the slumbering she-wolf in his bed.
Tonight, she is awake when he enters his bedroom, and though her eyes lock on his as soon as he closes the door, she doesn’t say anything from her perch against the headboard.
It strikes him just how tiny she looks in the oversized tunic and breeches that she’s wearing. A borrowed outfit since she arrived with nothing but the weapons on her belt and the clothes on her back.
Her knees are pulled up to her chest and she rests her chin against them as she looks at no particular spot. His heart stutters in his chest at the sight, something about it eliciting a desire to protect, to shield her from whatever demons have been plaguing her.
And oh, he knows there are demons, as surely as he knows that there will be a winter storm tonight. He can see it in how she holds herself, the fact that her supper sits untouched and the way she doesn’t even try to put up a farce.
Gendry tries not to rush as he removes his cloak and unlaces his boots before sitting on the edge of the bed and facing her.
“You haven’t eaten.”
“Wasn’t hungry,” Arya mumbles, her voice clearly hoarse from lack of use.
“You have to eat.”
Gendry’s not sure why he’s pushing. It can’t end well but it’s been nearly five days of this, of her living like a ghost within the confines of his chamber, and although he is so glad she is here, he knows this is not her.
This is not the Arya who had been so full of life, thirsting for justice and vengeance as a slip of a thing at two and ten. And it’s not even the Arya who had appeared one day in the Winterfell forge and recaptured his heart with a cold smirk and a raised eyebrow.
No, this Arya is but a shell of herself, and a part of him is so utterly terrified that whatever horrors she had seen in King’s Landing – and Davos had told him only a little of what he’d seen – have permanently sapped the life from her.
Pushing her is the only weapon left in his arsenal, the only way he knows to rile her up, and so he does it.
“Do you hear me?” Gendry probes when she doesn’t say anything back.
“Yes, I heard you. Did you hear me when I said I wasn’t hungry?”
Her tone is biting, but when she looks at him again, her large gray eyes convey nothing but sadness, and it disarms him completely.
“Alright,” he acquiesces and lays down on his side, keeping a respectable distance but still looking at her expectantly, “maybe tomorrow then?”
Arya unfurls herself and lies down, facing him.
“Tomorrow.” She promises and closes her eyes.
The next morning is the first that Gendry wakes up with Arya tucked underneath his arm.
He desperately wants to stay in bed with her, feel the warmth of her a little while longer, but he has lessons first thing after breakfast, and given his slow progress, he knows he cannot delay.
It’s a surprise as much to him as anyone else that he sees Arya on the training grounds later that afternoon.
She’s not sparring with anyone yet but is keenly observing the group of young lads instead, and he can tell that she’s enjoying it. Gendry watches her for a few moments and when her eyes land on his, he swears he sees a hint of mirth in them.
It’s the first time he really thinks that she’ll be alright after all.
It’s perhaps why his heart sinks to the bottom of his stomach when he is awakened that night not by the howls of the winter winds outside but by the whimpering coming from across the bed.
Arya lies curled on her side, fisting the sheets as she mutters to herself. Her words are incoherent but she’s clearly in distress. Her demons chase her in sleep, and all the horrors she has seen won’t even let her subconscious rest.
It’s only when she mutters his name, the pain so clear and evident in her voice, that Gendry snaps out of whatever reverie he is in and shakes her awake.
Her eyes snap open instantly, as if she’d not been in deep slumber just moments ago. Gendry can’t help the rush of emotions as she closes the space between them and wraps her arms around him.
He draws her in tighter, trying to quell the tremors that run through her body as her breathing settles down. His lips brush across her forehead completely on impulse and he feels her shiver in an entirely different way.
It’s not the time nor the place, but it does settle him a bit that she doesn’t pull away from him at such a bold gesture.
They haven’t really touched in months, at least not until the night before, and though Gendry would be a liar if he didn’t admit that he’s missed the feel of her, has thought about not much else in the quiet moments that he had to himself, kissing Arya is for once the furthest thing from his mind. Not when she’s shivering like a leaf with unspeakable horrors running through her mind.
“Arya.”
Her body tenses but she says nothing.
“Will you talk to me?” he presses on anyway, because he has to, he owes her that much.
The stretch of silence seems to go on forever and then…
“There was so much smoke…and ash.”
He was right then.
“And so many bodies, all burning. Women, children, the old…all of them extinguished.”
She grabs onto his tunic as she says it, and Gendry feels the familiar taste of bile rising up into his throat as he thinks about what she must have seen; what she lived through that horrible day and all the days before that.
The instinct to shield her from all of it nearly makes him angry, the injustice of it all, but he knows he has to quell that Baratheon fury. Arya has witnessed enough rage.
“It’s alright, you’re here now, you’re safe.”
It seems like the wrong thing to say, because she shudders even more, “but that’s the point, I survived but I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t save any of them. What good am I if I can kill the dead, but can’t save the living?”
Gendry’s had enough.
He sits up and pulls her up to face him, hands cradling her cheeks and trying to forget that the last time he held her like this, she’d been so sure of herself, so confident…such a far cry from the woman in his arms now.
He wants to make her whole again, needs to.
“Arya, look at me.”
She does and he feels a knot coil beneath his ribs at the sight of her unshed tears.
“It’s not your fault the Queen went mad and took her rage out on the innocents.”
He still can’t quite believe it sometimes, can’t truly comprehend that the kind if a bit standoffish woman he had met at Dragonstone was capable of burning an entire city to the ground, even a shit one like King’s Landing.
But grief does strange things to people, and even the highborn are not immune to it.
If anything it drives them mad with power and Gendry has seen it all. But the unfairness of it – the remnants of the act – now manifested in the survivor’s guilt that plagues the brave woman in front of him frustrates him more than anything.
“The worst part is,” Arya continues as if she has not heard him, “is that every day since, I have wondered. What if Davos never came for you, what if you had never gone to Dragonstone or found your way to Winterfell. You would have been there that wretched day. You would have been, and I wouldn’t have been able to save you, and you would have burned with the rest.”
Her confession stuns him, as do the large tears that start to roll down her cheeks a moment later. It occurs to him suddenly that he’s never actually seen Arya cry, not when they were held captive, not when they were on the run, and not even when the dead were coming for them.
She’s never been this vulnerable, not with him and perhaps not with anyone. Gendry knows no amount of cajoling or reassurance from him will be able to ease her ache tonight. He lays her down against him, kisses her forehead and strokes her hair until her breath evens out.
Eventually, her grip on his tunic loosens into a gentle hold.
He barely sleeps a wink that night.
xxx